Stocks jumped at the market’s open bell, then padded gains in the afternoon following the Federal Reserve’s policy statement.

Release the tea-leaf readers! The Fed sounded more upbeat about the jobs market but remains concerned about tepid inflation. Yellen & Co. have three more meetings this year to follow through on their expectation to hike rates; next up, Sept. 16-17.

Bonds fell. Gold and oil also inched a higher out from near multi-year lows. All 10 of the S&P’s sectors rallied, though recently hot niche industries, including the iShares Nasdaq Biotechnology (IBB) and Global X Social Media Index ETF (SOCL), fell sharply. Social media will be in focus again after Facebook (FB) posted solid quarterly results but traders still sent the stock lower in after-hours trading.

Forget the active versus passive investment debate. The surest way to trail your benchmark is to pay too much for passive indexing.

Micheal Johnston at Fund Reference singles out plain-vanilla index funds that charge above-market fees as the most pernicious on the market. Why do these fund companies charge so much? Because they can.

“The Worst Mutual Fund in the World is not an absurdly expensive fund run by a manager pursuing some exotic strategy. It’s actually an index fund that seeks to replicate one of the most widely-followed benchmarks in the world. Wondering how such a product could be the target of such scorn from a fan of indexing? Easy: charge investors 60 basis points to track the S&P 500.”

Johnston does the math on the Great-West S&P 500 Index Fund (MXVIX), which charges 0.6% a year. Assuming a 30-year time frame compared with an S&P 500-tracking fund that charges 0.1%, he concludes that an investor is missing out on $114,000 over their lifetime. There are numerous funds that offer even higher fees.

“Being gouged for a cold beer at the ball park is tolerable. Losing out on $114,000 in your retirement account isn’t.”

“Financial literacy has increased significantly in recent years, and the trend toward fee-only advisors and low-cost funds is certainly encouraging. But in many 401(k) plans and elsewhere, absurd expense ratios remain the norm. And in some cases, the trend is going the other way; Great-West recently launched a new share class of its S&P 500 Index Fund — with an 85 basis point expense ratio.

If your 401(k) options are limited to gluttonous funds, your options are limited. But you’re not completely powerless. If you ever leave the company, grab the paperwork needed to roll over into a more flexible IRA on your way out the door. In the meantime, send this article to the administrator of your company’s plan. Let them know that the plan they selected is costing you dearly, and request the addition of some low-cost funds to the menu. Who knows? Enough frustration may translate into action.”

Carnage in the share prices of two social media companies is weighing on growth and tech-oriented mutual and exchange-traded funds on Wednesday.

The big mover, though, is just on the horizon. Facebook (FB) poised to post after the closing bell.

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News

Twitter (TWTR) is plunging 14% after beating its quarterly estimates but still is grappling with flat user growth. Meanwhile, yelp is a good word to summarize the drop of the publicly traded restaurant review site. Yelp (YELP) is down 28%, down to the lowest price in two years, after cutting its revenue forecast for 2015 by 5%.

Earnings season, on pace to result in a first-half profit decline for S&P 500 companies (the first since 2009), has resulted in chunky moves for some big companies, including Amazon (AMZN) and Apple (AAPL).

The $84 million Global X Social Media ETF (SOCL) is down 1.5%, with its roughly 3.5% stakes in both Twitter and Yelp weighing down prices. SOCL is also the biggest holding, at 12.3% — ETF the largest concentration of any ETF or mutual fund, according to XTF and Morningstar.

Other ETFs that own big slugs of Twitter include the Renaissance IPO ETF (IPO), the ARK Web X.0 ETF (ARKW) and PowerShares Nadaq Internet Portfolio (PNQI). All are lower.

Owners of the $70 million, social-media focused Berkshire Focus (BFOCX) are likely so see Twitter’s stumble materialize when they check out their end-of-day net-asset values. As of the end of March, the most recently available data, the mutual fund held a roughly 7% stake in Twitter, according to Morningstar. The same applies to the $870 million TransAmerica Morgan Stanley Mid-Cap Growth fund. It held about 5% Twitter.

Home-building stocks have had a sturdy year. A coming wave of apartment building construction might mean there’s more to go.

Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg News

Workers build apartments at a construction site in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles, California, U.S., on Tuesday, June 30, 2015.

Justin Lahart at The Wall Street Journalmakes the case that an improving jobs market is pushing more Americans, some from their parents’ basements, into new apartments, bigger apartments. Rents are going up, and vacancy rates are going down, currently at their lowest since 1985.

“But before reckoning that this situation makes for an opportune time to buy into residential real-estate investment trusts, or load up on rental units, investors should take a look at what is happening with supply.

The SPDR S&P Homebuilders ETF (XHB), in spite of its name, actually owns only one-third of is positions in home-construction companies. Another third are in building products. Masco (MAS), which makes building supply products, saw its shares catapult 11% on Tuesday after its earnings topped analyst estimates. Another option is the iShares U.S. Home Construction ETF (ITB), which is about two-thirds builders. Both are up about 8% this year.

A fracking crew member works outside the Halliburton Sandcastle, at an Anadarko Petroleum Corporation site, near Brighton, Colo.

West Texas Intermediate crude prices rose 2.2% to $49.02 a barrel in early trading. Prices ascended after a report on oil inventories surprisingly fell, helping to assuage some long-standing concerns about oversupply and weak demand.

The Department of Energy reported that crude inventories fell 4.2 million barrels last week, compared to an increase of 2.5 million during the prior week.

Energy stocks rebounded from a long string of declines on Tuesday. How does it look now? Many investors are likely eying their speculative, buy-the-dip energy holdings that looked fleetingly prescient earlier this year. Oil prices fell more than 50% from last summer’s high before bottoming at around $44 a barrel in March. There was a two-month rally, but then commodities of all stripes have been bleeding out since May.

Jason DeSena Trennert at Strategas says to watch energy stocks bounce to continue, but then to consider cutting back:

“We still don’t like them from a trend perspective. I probably makes some sense to back away from shorts in the near-term, but we doubt a meaningful turn is underway these trouble groups.

The bounce for the energy sector can probably carry it back to the downward sloping 50-day average (about 7% from here), at which point we’d look to fade strength.”

The Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund(XLE), Vanguard Energy ETF (VDE) and iShares U.S. Energy ETF (IYE) all rose around 1.2%. For the XLE, which traded recently at $71.24, the 50-day average referenced by Trennert is right around $79.

London-based Mako Investment Managers has seen its assets fall by 95%, to $59 million from $1.14 billion, since the end of 2012, according to The Wall Street Journal‘s Laurence Fletcher. Whoa. Its Pelagus Capital Fund did well in the 2008 financial crisis.

Well, hard to blame investors. The Journal story says that, “hedge funds that trade sovereign bonds are up 2.1% in the first half of this year, according to Hedge Fund Research, having gained just 1.2% in both 2013 and 2014.” Who would pay two-and-twenty on top of a 1.2% return, when a select FDIC-insured online savings account pay 1.25% annually for zero risk and zero fees? Take it to the bank.

“QE has almost killed these strategies,” Fletcher quotes a hedge fund investor.

Turns out that’s just where hedge funds have been fishing. Bloomberg’s Joseph Ciolli and Oliver Renick report that hedge fund ownership among the 93 stocks that make up the Russell 2000 Energy Index is roughly twice that of the broader stock market. That’s bad news, since that index is down 34% over the past three months.

After a brief respite from its precipitous decline, the Shanghai Composite Index tumbled 8.5% overnight, the worst one-day drop in eight years.

The reporters say that short-sellers, who aim to profit from borrowing stocks, selling them and buying back at a lower price, must pay the “equivalent of a 40% annualized drop just to break even,” citing Markit data. That means bears would need to figure that the ETF’s price decline — 30% from its June high — isn’t yet half baked.

There are inverse ETFs out there. Keep in mind that nearly all investors likely should avoid the Chinese stock market at all costs given a high probability to get scalded. The Direxion Daily CSI 300 China A Share Bear 1x Shares (CHAD) is up 9.2% today.

Apparently, no holds are barred in the fight to launch a “non-transparent” exchange-traded fund.

Eaton Vance (EV) came out swinging in defense of its forthcoming fund structure on Monday, taking the unusual step of sharing regulators’ correspondence with rival Precidian Investments.

Adocument, dated April 17, shows that a second attempt by Precidian to pass muster with regulators was denied. The document was not public until Eaton Vance posted it on its website.

Daniel McCabe, chief executive at Precidian, told Barron’s on Monday that he hasn’t responded the SEC’s letter but plans to resubmit another, revised application in “the next couple of weeks.” Here’s more from McCabe:

“You will see an application in the near term. The issues being raised [by the SEC] aren’t insurmountable — this is just normal course of business with the SEC,” McCabe said. “We want to take our time and make sure that the application being done appropriately, and that we’re being crystal clear in what we are proposing.”

Eaton Vance issued a press release early on Monday that shared the letter, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, that discloses that the Securities and Exchange Commission believes that Precidian’s latest application for its non-transparent fund structure “falls far short” addressing the SEC’s concerns. The SEC in October blocked the first attempt in October.

Eaton Vance also held a call with analysts and media this morning to discuss the filing and other aspects of ETMFs’ progress, said Eaton Vance CEO Thomas Faust Jr., in order to “remove the perception out there that [a competing structure] is possibly on the verge of approval” that could rival its “NextShares” ETMFs.

Faust told Barron’s the following after the call:

“My expectation is that fund companies that are looking to offer actively managed products will have three choices 1) mutual funds 2) fully transparent ETFs and 3) NextShares.”

Eaton Vance last year won approval for “exchange-traded managed funds,” or ETMFs, which would trade throughout the day like an exchange-traded fund but disclose their holdings monthly or quarterly, like mutual funds.

Daily disclosure is staple of the ETF industry but an albatross for mutual funds trying to get into the ETF market. Stock pickers have been reticent to join the fast-growing ETF market, asset managers have said, in part due to concerns over sharing their portfolio holdings every day, as is required with active ETFs. A daily reveal, the argument goes, would render portfolios vulnerable to predatory traders who might try to “front-run” the funds and dent performance.

Analysts have voiced concern in recent weeks that Eaton Vance hasn’t yet announced that it has locked down brokerages to help distribute ETMFs. Other analysts have observed that the largest asset managers have yet to throw their hats in the ring to license Eaton Vance’s ETMF technology.

About Focus on Funds

As exchange-traded funds and other investing vehicles have ballooned in number, the task of figuring out what works well and what doesn’t has only gotten harder. Barrons.com’s Focus on Funds looks under the hood of ETFs, mutual funds and hedge funds for overlooked values, actionable ideas and the latest pitfalls for fund investors.

Chris Dieterich has covered the U.S. stock market for The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. He is a graduate of Regis University and the Missouri School of Journalism.